Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending October 30th, 2022.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past 7 days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from October 24th to October 30th, 2022, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season. However, in its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix used the CVE metric to talk about The Gray Man, so there’s value in this metric, however imperfect it might be.
1. The Good Nurse has a killer start on Netflix
Picture: Netflix
The School for Good and Evil kept its third place in the ranking for the best launch for any film released on a Wednesday just one week as The Good Nurse kicked him out this week.
With 33.3M CVE in its first 5 days, it does a really good start, and its audience approval seems better than The School for Good and Evil. So I expect it to stick around in the coming weeks.
2. All Quiet on the Western Front also starts really well.
The new adaptation of the book by Erich Maria Remarque has been positioned by Netflix as an award contender this season and it seems to equally please subscribers as it debuted with 12.8M CVE in just 3 days, the fifth launch for any European Netflix film in our dataset. The film should enter the all-time Top 10 for International film in its third week. Its fate will become clearer after its second week but I expect it to end its 28-day run between 87 and 108 million hours viewed. Its audience approval rating is one of the best for any Netflix Original film on IMDb so far, with 7.9/10.
3. Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities underwhelms for its debut week.
With this series, Netflix tried a new release format, with two episodes released daily over four days in the week leading up to Halloween. That should have made for a nice first week, but on the contrary, it’s quite underwhelming, with only 6.2M CVE over its first 6 days.
We will see next week if it picks up or not, as this quite low launch might be because of its unusual release pattern. But if it was a test, I’m not sure it performed well. Live and learn!
How is Cabinet of Curiosities performing vs Raising Dion S2, How to Sell Drugs Online and Gabby’s Dollhouse.
4. The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself does not scare a lot of people
Netflix seems to have done a lot of marketing around The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself in the UK and the reviews were quite good but ultimately, the new series failed to make its mark with only 2.1M CVE in its first three days. That’s the lowest launch for a new British series released on a Friday.
5. Big Mouth is back for a sixth season.
One of the longest-running Netflix animated series was back for its sixth season, and it’s already renewed for a seventh one.
However, its launch signals a significant drop from season 5, with only 3M CVE after three days, when season 5 did 4.2M in the same time span.
6. Two films came back from the grave: Hubie Halloween and Lost Bullet
One of the most common misconceptions about Netflix is that films are buried deep inside the catalog and nowhere to be found after release. Again, this week proves that it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Picture: Netflix
Hubie Halloween with Adam Sandler, released in October 2020, managed to crawl back into the Top 10 this week, proving that it might become a Halloween season favorite for subscribers.
The second film to come back is the French action film Lost Bullet, which added 2.1M CVE last week, two years and a half after its original release. The reason might be obvious: the sequel is set to be released on November 10, but I find it quite interesting that people would make the effort to (re)watch the film in anticipation of the sequel’s release they would have known about through the “Coming Soon” page, for example. It might also be that the film is pushed more by the algorithm in preparation for the release.
Anyways, it’s not the first time old Netflix films are making their way back into the top 10, a sign of what Netflix’s homepage does best: constantly shuffling its catalog to make it feel new to subscribers. If Netflix would release weekly Top 20 or top 50, we might see more evidence of that. Lost bullet, for instance, was in the top 10 4 times over the last 50 weeks.
7. A focus on Fate: The Winx Saga cancellation.
Fate: The Winx Saga was canceled after two seasons.
Let’s look back at its evolution over its first month. The cancellation seems a bit surprising, especially if we compare it to other seasons of the English-speaking series.
Fate: The Winx Saga S2 vs other shows. Those in green were renewed and those in red are canceled.
The series did better than Sweet Magnolias for example, which was renewed. Still, it also did noticeably lower than other young adult series such as Never Have I Ever and Outer Banks.
Viewership is not the only factor that comes into the renewal decision and for Fate: The Winx Saga, the decay rate might have been key.
First, the decay rate between seasons 1 and 2 was pretty steep.
According to Netflix, season 1 was started by 57M accounts over its first 28 days back in 2021. From what I could gather, my CVE metric is closer to the starter numbers that used to be provided by Netflix than the completers numbers, so season 2, with its 25.5M CVE or so after 28 days, might be closer to 35-40M starter, accounts than 57M for season 1.
Then, the decay rate week after week for the second season was also noticeably higher than other series released on a Friday.
So that might explain why season 3 will never see the light of day.
